ALL around the world, students in colleges and schools are getting back to work. And alongside traditional textbooks and notepads, millions of smartphones and tablets — which spent the vacation taking photos, making selfies and messaging friends — will be in book bags for more serious purposes. With the right apps, a mobile device can be a student’s best friend.

Keeping on top of all the demands on time is hard for students of all ages, and the inClass app, free for iOS devices, is a great solution. The app is a smart calendar that is both personal assistant and glorified timetable. It consolidates all your class schedules, homework deadlines and so on into one place, and can remind you well ahead of time when a particular assignment is due.

InClass even has built-in note-taking powers so you can keep track of important ideas from class, or record audio or video notes.

The app’s interface is a little busy, though, and feels clunky when entering all your schedule details. Also, to use a drawing tool for more visual notes you have to pay $1 for an in-app purchase. Still, over all it’s a useful app.

On Android, a good equivalent to inClass is the free app Studious by Braden Young. Like inClass, it is a one-stop digital schedule and assignment planner, and can remind you of test dates or homework deadlines plus store notes you’ve made in lectures. It can also automatically silence your phone for the times it thinks you’re in a lesson, preventing you from experiencing that horrible moment when your personalized ring tone interrupts the class.

The app hasn’t been updated in a while, but it still does the trick. What’s more, its design is really nice — closer to a clean, minimalist-style iOS app than inClass.

A good graphing calculator can help you understand some tricky math concepts. On iOS my graphing calculator of choice is Quick Graph+, which costs $2.

This app can display both 2-D and 3-D graphs, and the 3-D graphs you produce can be rotated to get a feel for exactly what’s going on. Its interface is designed so it’s easy to enter and edit the equations you want to plot, and it’s easy to choose which equations you want to display on the same graph. Also, there’s a library to store frequently used equations, and you can evaluate an equation at particular points if this helps to solve a problem.

Sometimes you may get a little lost in this app’s menus, particularly when editing an equation, but otherwise this is a slick and speedy calculator.

For a similar app on Android, I like Graphing Calculator by Mathlab, which has many of the same features and is free, though ad-supported. The pro edition, which is $4.50, is ad-free.

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Another handy app no matter the subject is a dictionary. On Android, Windows Phone and iOS the Dictionary.com app is a favorite. It’s free and its design makes the job of finding the word you need pretty simple. It has a built-in thesaurus and audio pronunciation guide so you’ll know how to say the words, plus most of its content works offline so you can use it even in areas where you can’t connect to the Internet.

Nowadays, teachers and professors share a lot of learning materials in digital formats. For moving all those course-related documents, images and other files between your laptop and your smartphone or tablet, as well as sharing notes or other content with fellow students, Dropbox is great.

This cloud-based storage service makes it easy to, for example, upload a Word file from your desktop so you can read it on your phone while you’re traveling, or on a break between classes. You can keep your documents private, or with just a few clicks generate a link to send to classmates so they can have access to shared files and work collaboratively.

Dropbox is free for just two gigabytes of cloud storage, and upgrading to the Pro version for one terabyte costs $10 a month. It’s available for iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

If Dropbox is not your thing, Box has an excellent app that works similarly and also offers a more reasonable amount of free storage and apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Lastly, note-taking on your phone or tablet is probably something you’ll do often, and that’s where Evernote can help. This app is flexible and its interface is well designed, which means it’s easy to type in text notes or add an image during a lesson. The app is free for iOS and Android devices. Because it is popular, some of your colleagues may already be using it, which makes sharing easier.

And while TwoDots and Candy Crush are sitting there right next to your educational apps, try to resist while in class.

Quick Call

The classic shooter game BioShock, which has been a PC and console staple for years, has been ported to iOS devices. Faithful to the immersive story and great graphics of the original, the new version has been adjusted to allow touch-screen controls. It’s a fabulous game, for $15.

A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 2014, on Page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: Take Note of These Back-to-School Aids. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe